


Quite Incidental

by Exxact



Series: Tango: An Imperial Canon Divergence AU [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amputation, Canon-Typical Violence, Catheters, Character Study, Chronic Pain, Dom/sub, Established Relationship, Force Choking, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Narcissism, Night Terrors, Planetary Genocide, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Power Dynamics, Self-Hatred, Suicide, Tarkin Lives AU, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Vomiting, Xenophobia, radiation poisoning, villains in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-20
Updated: 2016-10-20
Packaged: 2018-08-23 12:28:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8327860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Exxact/pseuds/Exxact
Summary: “Evacuate?  In our moment of-““Governor!  A message from the Emperor.”Wilhuff is cut off by Vader’s figure sweeping towards him, his mechanical rasp unaffected by the apparently pressing matter. “Deliver it at once.”“The Emperor has felt a great shift in the Force.  He has instructed me to take you aboard my shuttle as an evacuation measure.  You are to come with me immediately.” Tarkin survives the Death Star's destruction.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Loosely inspired by FuneralMute's Den of Foxes AU. Please heed the tags.
> 
> Thank you to Baethoven for the beta!

“We've analyzed their attack, sir, and there is a danger. Should I have your ship standing by?”

Wilhuff listens as the familiar sounds of the Death Star’s command center wheel around him, tensely, flawlessly. He is unimpressed by this rebel cell’s sentimentality, no doubt seeking revenge after Organa’s planet was obliterated with little planning done beforehand. Very well. It is a simple suicide mission, and a well-placed glare is enough to remind the commander that his fear will earn him nothing but a traitor’s execution. 

“Evacuate? In our moment of-“

“Governor! A message from the Emperor.”

Wilhuff is cut off by Vader’s figure sweeping towards him, his mechanical rasp unaffected by the apparently pressing matter. 

“Deliver it at once.”

“The Emperor has felt a great shift in the Force. He has instructed me to take you aboard my shuttle as an evacuation measure. You are to come with me immediately.”

Wilhuff hides his snort of derision behind his hand. “Lord Vader, the power of this station is far greater than that of a refugee princess and her reconnaissance team.” _There is no time for this witchcraft, especially not now,_ he doesn’t add.

“The Emperor has ordered us to leave the base, and I must follow his orders.” _So petulant still,_. 'I _will follow his orders-but will_ you?'

“Very well,” Wilhuff replies tonelessly, matching his strides to Vader’s with practiced ease as they leave the command center and make their way to the hangar, passing flocks of stormtroopers rushing past. _Yes,_ Wilhuff thinks, _the Emperor is ruled by his delusions, while he is ruled by confidence in his own planning instilled within his men._

Vader stops before a TIE fighter docked close to the officer’s shuttles. A heavily modified prototype with curved wings for speed, it is undoubtedly Vader’s design. 

Wilhuff strokes the bridge of his nose, irritated. “The Emperor has ordered us to evacuate together in a TIE fighter?” 

“I will eliminate their mission’s leader and then I will fly us to Coruscant,” Vader says by way of an answer. 

Wilhuff bites back a grimace. “Well, do it quickly if you must. The fit for both of us in that will be dreadful.”

An enemy shot lands directly above the hangar, sending a shower of sparks and metal crashing against the head of the bay. Wilhuff finds himself lifted from the ground and unceremoniously stuffed inside the TIE’s hull, his right side already beginning to cramp against the pressure as Vader climbs into the cockpit proper. 

Vader is as reckless a pilot as ever, careening them into the midst of the Rebel fleet immediately after takeoff. Wilhuff, unable to move his head for a view of the action, focuses instead on keeping his breathing steady as Vader spins the TIE as though acrobatics would grant him a better shot at the X-wing he’s pursuing.

Neither of them speak until Vader abruptly lets up, muttering something about the Force before falling silent once again. Even from his poor vantage point, Wilhuff is able to see the approaching white flame, the overpowering burst of light that can only have one source. 

Wilhuff blacks out against the energy of the blast and even as he returns to consciousness, he is blinded, trapped in a prototype fighter spinning wildly in open space and then suddenly, horribly crushed against a planet’s surface, the raw bone of his right cheek digging into his lower jaw when he spits blood and bile from his roiling body.

Vader is motionless beside him, and this is no way for a Grand Moff to die, vomit on his insignia plaque atop the uniform he’d standardized himself, bits of tissue dangling from his scalp as piss floods his trousers. Hatred fills him, blots out the worst of the pain before he is granted the dignity of nothingness.

 

+

Wilhuff is removed from the bacta tank, dragged back to consciousness without preamble. He blinks rapidly, immediately noting that vision is lost on his right side. When he reaches with his corresponding hand to feel if the eye itself still remains, he is confronted with the image of his arm truncated at the elbow, a pink band of flesh sealed across it. Though he chokes on a huff of breath, he prides himself on his otherwise silent acceptance of this sight. 

Orson pushes the med droid out of the way, takes Wilhuff’s pathetic figure into his arms, lays him on a waiting cot. Wilhuff doesn’t trust his voice to remain steady, but his eye is clear enough to focus pointedly on Orson’s distraught face.

“Darling, darling,” Orson repeats, staring down upon Wilhuff with blank confusion as though he were the one fresh from the batch tank, dropped back into a life wasted by Vader’s wrath. Orson seems to be in greater shock than he is-just as well considering that Orson’s tears, while rare, had always been a weakness of Wilhuff’s that he shamefully never quashed.

There is more activity, Orson yelling, a droid’s garbled beeps as it is ripped apart when it tries to escort Orson out of the room.

It is only once he is situated proudly against the headboard in the master bedroom, Orson and the flurry of droids dismissed with a wave of his remaining hand, that Wilhuff allows himself his fury. 

His survival is to be his punishment.

 

+

Slowly, every time Wilhuff wakes, he’s fed various pills and bits of information surrounding his miraculous survival in the midst of his station’s destruction. One rainy morning, he feverishly recites to Orson that he knows that Vader’s TIE took a burst of radiation from the Death Star’s explosion, temporarily blinding one eye and ravaging the other. A Rebel pilot had taken the distraction as an opportunity to get a shot on the TIE’s right wing, careening them away from that brilliant light and towards the backwater planet of Vaal. They’d crashed, which had effectively amputated his arm at the elbow and crushed the right side of his face into oblivion. The radiation’s effects persisted as Wilhuff had gone into convulsions while vomiting before finally, blessedly, blacking out. 

Vader was unharmed. 

After he has finished, his remaining eye sharp in the reflection of Orson’s reading glasses, Wilhuff turns down the bedcovers beside him. A gentle pat, and Orson is curled against his left side, fingers tangling in his pajama shirt as he whispers against Wilhuff’s collarbone. 

“And then Vader dragged you to a backwater outpost, slaughtered the occupants, and took their only shuttle to Coruscant, where you have since proceeded to make a nursemaid of me and a mockery of the strength of men half your age.”

Together, surrounded by the vulnerability of trust, they weep.

 

+

The first order Wilhuff gives to the service droids as soon as he is able to sit up without feeling the shudders that accompany a need to retch is for the mirror in Orson’s closet to be brought to him. _Best to assess the damage in full promptly_ , he decides. He will have no delusions of himself, desires no fanciful notions of the body that remains, and so he waits, steady and solemn, as the mirror is situated at the bottom of the bed. The droid disappears once again and Wilhuff is left to his evaluation, the wasted man before him hardly registering until both of them tap a pattern into the sheets with the fingers of their left hands, contemplative.

No longer struck dumb by his own reflection, Wilhuff is able to piece together his prior observations into a complete picture. There is the little matter of his amputated hand and arm, not to mention the great cavern where his right cheekbone and eye once resided. The radiation burst had caused all of his hair to disintegrate, and while the bacta tank had taken care of the worst of the infected ulcers that had coated his torso and neck, angry discolorations now mingle against much older, prouder scars.

Wilhuff’s gaze does not linger as it travels across the man in front of him, the one who avoids the blankness of his own glossy eye. No, it is the remaining topography of his features that are undeniably _his_ that he cannot look away from. There is his stately nose, untouched save for the remnants of the dreadful mucus painted along his nostrils. Beneath them are the lips that crack and bleed, the rash fanning out onto his chin and along his jaw. He winces, and  
the tendons of his neck are brought to even to higher relief. 

“Ah?” he breathes out, his intonation turning the phrase into a question. 

In lieu of an answer, his body responds with a sharp pull and an emptiness where the catheter resides within him.

Stripped bare to the disgrace of an invalid, Wilhuff is forced to accept his reflection with all the dignity the Emperor saw fit to crush.

 

+

Wilhuff refuses cybernetics, implants, and even tissue grafts with a wave of his remaining hand each time the parade of doctors offers them. He’s seen what they transformed Anakin Skywalker into, and while having even a fragment of his dominant hand returned to him holds a certain temptation, it is quickly quashed by the image of himself with a synthskin arm and mechanical eye, rubberized cheek turning to accept Orson’s kiss. No, better to suffer as himself than to live as little more than a pieced-together droid.

Reading is often out of the question with his body’s new penchant for migraines, as is walking beyond the refresher after several weeks of bedrest or eating solid food if his cheek is particularly testy. It bares a pathetic resemblance to tactical planning, taking the limiting factors of his capacities and the tasks he wishes to perform and pitting them against the outcomes of accepting or rejecting each medication Orson holds out to him.

Orson only wishes for Wilhuff to allow himself rest, he promises with every offering. _“If you’re going to kill yourself, do it quickly at the very fucking least!”_ he roars one evening as Wilhuff calmly tosses another cup of sedative pills into the garden below. Orson refuses to acknowledge the truth that, were he faced with the reality of Wilhuff cocooned in painlessness every hour of every day, he would grow to resent Wilhuff for his fragmented survival, would finally understand how the Emperor punished both of them in one fell swoop.

Within days of Wilhuff’s full recollection of the events that had brought him here, Orson-that perverted, thoughtful bastard-dismisses all the medical staff save for the emergency resuscitation droids. It’s a statement Wilhuff cannot help but respect despite himself, despite the constant terror this powerlessness brings him. Yes, Orson is divinely attentive, caring for Wilhuff with eager hands and a satisfied smile. At least when he grows hard against Wilhuff’s thigh whilst changing the bandages surrounding his truncated arm, he has the decency to leave the room afterwards.

 _Small mercies_ , his mother used to say, rubbing salve against the curve of his cheek reddened by her own slap.

Wilhuff thinks often of Orson’s role in his survival as he convalesces towards something resembling functionality, waiting for a stubborn wave of nausea to pass or fighting the shattering pain in his legs as he hobbles towards the promise of a bath. There is nothing quite as bittersweet as waking up to Orson’s sleepy smile every morning that is never the boyish grin of times before this, nothing that infuriates him so much as watching Orson dress without ceremony to review the Empire’s paperwork in his office tucked in the west wing of the villa.

How Orson cannot wish him dead in those moments is beyond Wilhuff. How Orson can soothe and care for the one figure unyielding enough to give him the resounding slap of dominance he so craved is an enigma, as becoming this bed-bound waif is to become the frigid, fragile wife both he and Orson had rejected for one another.

There had been such a creature planned for Wilhuff, one whose family and fortune were lost to the passage of time. Panteera, named for the Good Queen of Alderaan millennia before (he feels a shadow of a smile form at that, even now). But she’d been nothing like the Princess who had executed his downfall; no, Panteera had been far finer of breeding, a lady’s soft hands smoothing her silver gown across her lap, pretty conversation turning Jova Tarkin’s curses into empty compliments on her supposed good health. Wilhuff had been disgusted by her weakness, sneering down at her until she was bold enough to tug at his lapel, no trace of wine on her breath, and kiss him full on the mouth up against the compound’s parapet.

Wilhuff rests himself against the sharpness of the headboard, recalling the determination in Panteera’s gaze afterwards, her final act of agency lost the moment her mother crawled to her broken body where it lay in the forest below.

 

+

Much to Wilhuff’s surprise, it takes nearly two months before Orson’s temper gets the better of him beyond a rough word or shattered pill case. Orson’s blood runs hot, and while both of them possess the same fury, Orson shouts and simmers in his while Wilhuff frantically calculates risks and weaknesses behind a cordial mask. He and Orson are good at intrigue, better at plotting, and the best at predicting the fallacies of individuals and squadrons alike.

 _Stronger together,_ Orson would whisper, rutting against Wilhuff’s spent cock. 

_Stronger joined,_ Wilhuff would reply, shifting within Orson solely to feel him shudder.

They’ve been resting together all evening, Orson curled against Wilhuff’s chest when both feel Orson’s cock twitch insistently against Wilhuff’s upper thigh.

Orson actually has the gall to look sheepish. “I’ll be back in a moment, darling.”

“Good,” Wilhuff replies lightly. “You take care of that, I’ll take care of this.” He gestures to himself with his truncated arm, reaching over Orson to snatch a jar of sedatives.

“Don’t, Wil,” Orson murmurs, eyes snapped shut as he paces towards the window.

“Why ever not? I’ll just slip them while you’re preparing for bed and fall asleep with you. You'd hardly be able to tell the difference.” Wilhuff is only half-teasing, feels a shudder of hope rise in him that Orson will consent to this.

“You can’t do this to me, you bastard!” Orson bellows, slamming his hand against the sill before crawling atop the bed and pinning Wilhuff against the mattress. “You have no right to do this to me!”

“Look at me, Orson!” Wilhuff spits. “I am nothing now, less than nothing, certainly not the man you’ve loved! I don’t understand why you don’t fill the damn medical tube with synox one morning and have it done with. My, some days how I wish you would!”

Orson’s nose is pressed against his own, snarling breath hot against his lips. “If you’re ready to die, then I’ll die with you.” Wilhuff feels Orson shiver at his own demand, notes the hardness against his hip that Orson himself appears unaware of.

Wilhuff is unflinching as he responds. “And what good would your death solve? You’d be dying a traitor’s death, you know-abandoning the Empire for the sake of a lover. You’re as much a fool as Amidala and Skywalker if you do.”

“You’re worth a traitor’s death,” Orson moans, managing several seconds of a frantic kiss before Wilhuff summons all of his energy to backhand Orson’s cheek. 

Neither man bothers to hide their smile.

 

+

Underneath the uniform and cape is the Orson Wilhuff prefers, tender skinned and softly formed, vulnerable to him alone. Once, before he became this pathetic creature, coaxing Orson into kneeling readily for him was a rush of power as intense as submitting an execution command. To have such a volatile man at his whims, lapping up even Wilhuff’s most inventive perversities with reverence-yes, that was control in a fashion not even the Emperor possessed.

Orson kneels as beautifully as ever, half-prostrate before Wilhuff’s bedside. He looks up at Wilhuff, his defiant expression burning a familiar heat in Wilhuff’s belly. Even before this hideous failure, Orson had always been broader, heavier, yet so charmingly unwilling to use these advantages when Wilhuff’s teeth (and worse) were against his throat. Yes, Orson knows that he needs a firm hand-one that Wilhuff is more than willing to provide. 

“Sir, may I join you upon the bed?”

“No, of course not,” Wilhuff hisses, nearly snorting at the put-upon obedience in Orson’s voice. “Not without a display of your repertoire. Should you prove yourself skilled, I will consider it.”

Orson reaches out for Wilhuff’s truncated arm, tongue darting obscenely from between his lips. Wilhuff shoves his remaining hand back against Orson's skull and Orson jerks forward against it, earning himself a stinging pull of his hair.

“You will not touch that. And I will not touch you. Get to work.”

Orson pushes away the blankets, greedily mouthing the head of Wilhuff’s cock. Wilhuff feels a hideous overstimulation begin, a choking thickness in his chest.

“Poor dear, you’ve missed this, haven’t you?” His skin, the remains of his body are throbbing, heat rising off of him like the sweltering panic he’d felt in Vader’s TIE. 

“Fuck Wil, yes,” Orson’s voice is a wrecked whine against Wilhuff’s skin.

Wilhuff feels a pull of nausea in his belly, wants to slap Orson for his impertinence and remind him that the Grand Moff doesn’t allow whores to use his given name when they’re servicing him. He doesn’t. 

The dizzying heat slowly settles down into the familiar pulse of arousal. The angle is awkward, Orson’s chin digging into his hipbone, neck distended across the edge of the bed, cutting off his usual charming ability to suck Wilhuff down in one pull. Regardless, the sight of Orson on his cock is as heady as ever, and Wilhuff feels his body unclench, his eye slipping closed. 

Wilhuff sinks into the moment, feels a tiny thrill at the familiar sounds and tremors of Orson sucking his cock. He can ignore the migraine building against his temples, the half-arm he’s thrust underneath the pillow beside him so long as he delves into the sensations as deeply as he can. When he arches his back in order to indulge in Orson’s mouth further, the crack of his spine at last drags him back into the shattered rhythm of his body.

Wilhuff’s eye snaps open and there is only the cold reality looking down his nose shows him, the sight of his wasted pelvis against Orson’s reverent face. Wilhuff bites back a shudder, his knee rising to jolt Orson off of his cock.

“Stop that groveling this instant. Prepare yourself for me, boy.”

Orson rises to straddle Wilhuff lazily, his eyes never leaving Wilhuff’s left pupil. He smooths a dollop of lubricant into his palm and along his fingers from the bottle he’d laid by Wilhuff’s feet earlier with practiced motions, adding one finger and then another in short succession. 

Wilhuff frowns at the easy slide of Orson’s fingers into himself despite the length of time it’s been since they were last joined. Orson rides his fingers with short thrusts of his hips, cock bobbing enticingly over Wilhuff’s belly. Orson never uses his fingers when he gets himself off-far too much effort when a hand around his cock does the job more quickly. 

The ugly, thrumming heat returns to Wilhuff’s chest.

“You’re too loose, boy. Been conducting business on the side, have you? Stupid child, I won’t have a diseased whore on the end of my cock."

There’s a rawness to Wilhuff’s words. It’s been too long since he’s been aroused, too long to remember how to wait for his voice to level before speaking, to do more than spew a stream of filth.

“You’d take anything now, wouldn’t you? Perhaps Vader or the Emperor? My, even that Chiss could burst in and have you now, couldn’t he?”

Wilhuff knows that Orson is too far gone in his arousal to hear anything beyond the surface of the words, the tang of _boy_ and _whore_ and _cock_ enough to feast on. But as he continues, Wilhuff finds that his own words echo back emptily, rehearsed and cheap in a way they’ve never been before.

“Fuck Vader,” Orson growls, adding a third finger rather too soon. He seems to realize this, winces, lowers his gaze to Wilhuff’s just as he manages to find pleasure in it.

Wilhuff pinches Orson’s hip, chuckling bitterly. “Such language, boy.” 

“Your boy,” Orson smirks, pulling out his slick fingers and wrapping them around his own cock, stroking it, licking his lips once again.

Wilhuff’s response is a soft, meaningless exclamation as he watches Orson finally sink down upon his cock, leaning forward until their cheeks press against one another. They exchange ragged breaths between Wilhuff’s thrusts, a silence settling over Wilhuff’s mind during the surety of this act, the way it remains theirs alone and yet is horribly, irredeemably scarred by the third party of Wilhuff’s failure.

“Wil,” Orson murmurs shakily into the pillow beside Wilhuff’s head, and Wilhuff won’t deny himself this, can’t let any fragment of intimacy with Orson slip from his grasp. “Wil, don’t leave me.”

Wilhuff finishes sharply, suddenly even as he feels Orson’s erection soften, hips jolting into Orson’s belly once before settling back against the mattress. His mind is clearer than it has been since the station’s explosion, his body soothed by the steady flow of endorphins and Orson’s weight pressing against him, warm and familiar.

Atop him, Orson’s ragged breathing has given way to sobs. Wilhuff tucks his ruined arm deeper underneath the pillow, fumbling along Orson’s hairline with the unsteady fingers of his left hand, the remnants of his lips wet where they trace along Orson’s cheek. 

 

+

_There is a marble rampart overlooking a valley, lush and soaring before it bursts into licking green flames the moment Wilhuff’s bare feet mount the final step. The sensation of millions of hands grasping towards him on every side engulfs him until it and the tightness of Vader’s phantom grip against his throat are all he knows, thrust naked against their writhing limbs, their piss and blood and screams._

_The last wail echoes, distinctly female, a mother’s anger and despair melded into the form of Leia Organa. She too is unclothed, her hair unbound. She draws herself nearer, and now it is her hands that fracture his breathing without touch, her mouth sharp with a planet’s scream, her eyes swallowing the scene around them into blackness, sucking his guts from his body as though they were twin voids._

_The darkness sears against Wilhuff, and then there are flashes, images of Orson’s mouth bleeding as ulcers split him open into a bruise-colored mass of flesh, Leia gnawing greedily upon an officer’s severed right arm, his own body disintegrating in a hot burst of light that rips the scene into nothingness once again._

_Finally, there is Panteera’s slow, sad smile as she had faced him upon the parapet and slipped silently into the darkness, dead even before she could feel her teeth crack against the impact._

Wilhuff follows her gratefully. 

 

+

 _The dreams are fool’s visions,_ Wilhuff thinks, gripping the edge of the tall windowpane he stands beside with his remaining hand. 

Across the room from him Orson has stirred, tapping something on a datapad in a silent communication of privacy. Wilhuff is motionless, watching as dawn breaks slowly over the central garden, perfectly illuminating the fortress of the villa that he hasn’t left for over a standard year now. 

Wilhuff has always hated dawn, has never seen it as the source of renewal Kenobi had named it as a lifetime ago. Preference in a soldier is foolish, but Wilhuff had always been the first to volunteer for midnight patrols on the Security Force, glad to wake to the late-morning hum of activity and not to memories of the silent crepuscular beasts who haunted the plateau. 

Wilhuff’s mind drifts back to the shadows that woke him, wheezing out a particularly stubborn breath as he does so, as though his body is distracting him in a belated attempt at self-preservation. 

Every war has casualties. If Wilhuff has caused more than others, it is a result of rank, not morality. There is no more to the matter than that. To analyze the dream further is to waste energy and time, and so he turns from the window, sheds his robe, slips back into his place beside Orson.

Orson hands him a lighter sedative and Wilhuff swallows it quickly, the resulting sleep soft, pristine.

 

+

“The Empire is going to fall, darling.”

Orson’s voice is as soft as Wilhuff has ever heard it, his gaze darting from where it focuses on Wilhuff’s good eye towards the corners of their room.

“This second station is a fever dream, the Emperor’s last grasp at what he lost when yours was destroyed.” Wilhuff’s lips twitch at the last. Dear Orson, ever frank. “I’ve seen the data he claims supports it’s impregnability. It’s a fool’s errand, a hasty copy of greatness.” 

Wilhuff is silent until he realizes that Orson will not say his piece without further coaxing. His answer is gentle, as is his touch to Orson’s ear. “Go on, then. No improvements?”

“The Emperor claims to have increased the laser’s scale. He has me on standby for reference on shield generators. Supposedly they’re taking the thing to Endor, if that can be called any upgrade in locale.”

Wilhuff leans forward against Orson’s shoulder, strategy flowing through him as naturally as his own breath. “Who do they have overseeing it? How are they powering it?”

“Jerjerrod. And damned if I’m privy to any more than that.” 

Wilhuff chuckles, places a kiss beneath Orson’s stiff jaw. “Jerjerrod as my replacement? My, you truly believe he’s daft enough to hand the rebels a victory? Your lack of faith in our supreme Empire’s leadership is treasonous, my boy.”

Orson stands, hurt settling over him, stark as the white of his uniform. “Wil. Wil, the Emperor wishes for you to address the upper ranks as construction proper commences.”

Fear and rage drag Wilhuff to his feet before he can form a thought. He snaps into a soldier’s stance before Orson’s stiff figure, studying the man before him as though it were Orson himself who had commanded him to atone for his failure through this voyeurism.

“I will not be made a mockery of!” he hisses, gaze level despite the sudden fury he can feel radiating from Orson.

“No!” Orson shouts, a wild grin twisting his face. “No, the Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin must never be made a mockery of! But that Krennic bastard, he can suffer a lieutenant’s shield generator paper-pushing! He can bear a Jedi’s isolation in his office!”

“You think I don’t suffer in this, _darling_?” Orson spits, thrusting himself forward until they are nose-to-nose and Wilhuff can feel every movement of Orson’s features against his skin. “You’re not the only one the Emperor has cast to the gutters, you know. Not the only one to suffer humiliation. You simply do it much less gracefully, one minute the martyr, the next begging me to kill you like a coward!”

Wilhuff cannot find it in himself to respond appropriately to Orson’s outburst. Instead, he feels a strange sense of relief rise within him, a lessening of the worry that has burrowed into his mind so deeply that he had forgotten it had ever not been present. 

Wilhuff withdraws himself from Orson’s support, calmly leaning against the edge of the window. “Then why prolong this, Orson? Why spend another year with your indignity, with my pain, with our suffering?” 

Orson’s eyes snap shut and suddenly he is crouched against Wilhuff’s knees, clutching them with shaking hands. Wilhuff attempts to draw his free hand through Orson’s hair until he realizes, as bluntly as the first horrible time, that it is gone. He settles for tugging him upright and resting his head against his chest, the metal of Orson’s insignia plaque distorting the sound of the heartbeat beneath. 

There is nothing after death, Wilhuff knows. It is a void, as simple to understand as a blank datapad screen. It is only fools and children who try to interpret the meaning within that bald nothingness, to make it more than what it is.

“If we cannot have the deaths we deserve, then let us have the deaths we can control.” 

Orson nods. “The Emperor said that his ship will come in two rotations. Let us finish this in one.”

 

+

The hours following their decision are spent apart from one another. Orson returns to his office two floors down at Wilhuff’s bequest, leaving both of them to face their final written words with as little mawkishness as possible under the circumstances.

But what is left to say? Wilhuff’s death is not a defection from the Empire. He will wear the uniform he himself designed and put into circulation to show as much. No, this is an act of defiance, but it is not an act of rebellion. It is the reality of a man denied an honor higher than an insignia plaque, the hastily-written epilogue of two commanders without a ship who would not shake their pride.

In the end, Wilhuff settles for the simplest option, doffing a uniform from his closet and forgoing any further sentimentality. Such a statement will, with any luck, let his body’s death slip into anonymity and allow the Tarkin Doctrine to span on through its interpretation and implementation, uncomplicated by the man himself. 

As he tightens the second buckle of his boot with some difficulty, Wilhuff thinks not for the first time of his current rank. In the slow slip into invalidity, he has never once received word as to who the Empire considers him to be without the Death Star, has never read a message addressed to Grand Moff Tarkin inquiring as to his health and recovery. He had believed that Orson had simply intercepted and replied to such messages himself for fear of distressing Wilhuff further, but as his arm flounders within his tunic’s spare sleeve, he feels a flame of anger in his belly. What if he had simply been discarded, treated as a casualty without the dignity of being such?

Wilhuff calls in a droid to fix the bedclothes and tidy the room while he allows his resentment to cool into disdain, the moon rising softly behind him. He is soothed by the quiet hum of the droid, falling asleep and only realizing he has done so when he stirs again at the sound of Orson’s voice.

“Is everything all right, darling?”

Wilhuff could laugh at the absurdity of the question, but the set of Orson’s features deters him from doing so. Instead, he rises in the darkness to rest himself against Orson, who is also clothed in his uniform proper. When he sees Wilhuff glance down at his insignia plaque, he unpins it and throws it into the pool of the garden below, a grin belying clouded eyes.

“Yes, Orson,” Wilhuff murmurs as Orson closes the window and draws the curtains, submerging them deeper into the blackness of the room. He feels Orson rest himself on the bed, hears his gentle breathing beside Wilhuff’s own shuddering breaths as he fights back the urge to cough. Instead, he reaches into the cylindrical pocket of his tunic for the four identical tablets, slipping two into Orson’s waiting mouth before pressing the remaining dose between his lips. Immediately, Wilhuff feels the energy sink from his mind down through his chest, resting itself warmly across his breastbone. He leans himself back against the pillows, drawing Orson down with him. The disintegrating pills are bitter in a nearly pleasant way, soothing any last thoughts of the Emperor and Vader from his mind. 

Wilhuff positions himself so that his eye might meet Orson’s, careful to keep from disturbing the pressed sheets beneath. There are no last words exchanged, no flowing declarations of love for a commitment nearly forty years in the making. This act, their legacies intertwined, is enough. 

Orson’s eyes slip closed, and Wilhuff is lulled by the sound of the steadily decreasing heartbeat he has curled himself against, his body not even bothering to fight the poisonous dose he’d trusted it with.

 

+

There is nothing, and there is peace in such.

**Author's Note:**

> -The novel "Tarkin" details how Tarkin designed the Imperial military's uniforms. Fashion designer Tarkin is more or less canon.
> 
> -Vader's survival story is taken from the comic "Empire 14: The Savage Heart." I chose to leave out the pack of Hyenax. Apologies to any Vader purists.
> 
> -The Emperor had a villa on the Western Sea of Coruscant. I assumed that someone of Tarkin's rank would also have one (though most likely not next door to Palpatine's).
> 
> -Synox is a colorless, odorless, poison used by high-level assassins.


End file.
